The FBI confirmed Tuesday that there was no connection between D.B. Cooper -- the man still wanted for the world's only unsolved hijacking -- and the parachute dug up last month in southwest Washington.

The hijacker boarded a commercial Portland-to-Seattle flight Nov. 24, 1971, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. The one working parachute he jumped with was a military issue model, and children playing last month on newly plowed property near Amboy thought they had discovered it.

"Cooper's parachute was nylon, and the one the FBI has is silk," said Earl Cossey, the man who provided Cooper's chute and inspected the FBI's find on Friday. "The one they have is from about 1945."

So where did the mysterious chute come from? A local military historian and an Air Force veteran believe it could be from a 1945 crash in the same area.

Marine Lt. Floyd Walling was piloting a Corsair airplane flying from Portland to Seattle on Dec. 27, 1945. He later told his wife that he encountered bad weather and had to bail out when his instruments failed.

"Every time I tried to get him to quit smoking, he said it was a cigarette lighter that kept him alive," said his son, Choya Walling, of Bryan, Texas. "He used it to build a fire to stay warm."

Walling walked about eight miles until he came near the town of Yale, about nine miles from Amboy, the following day.

"He had followed a creek for the last part and we found him near Reese's store," said Howard Hanson, who was an Army Air Force lieutenant assigned to search for Walling. "We wanted to find out exactly where he landed, but he was really confused and noncommittal after being out there."

Another pilot who had bailed out from another plane was found dead in his chute. Jo Walling said her husband, who later fought in the Korean War and died in 1999, didn't specify how he got out of his parachute. Hanson said that, depending on the type of chute, he either slipped out of the harness or used a survival knife most pilots carried in case their chutes became hung up.

The date stamped on the found parachute -- Feb. 21, 1946 -- is the repacking date, not the packing date, Hanson said. Local military historian John "Cye" Laramie said last week that date was the only thing questionable about linking it to Walling's crash.

FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs said it's "definitely possible" Walling's chute is the one they have, but the bureau does not plan to further investigate it.

"We never did find Walling's chute," said Hanson. "It just was left out there in the same place they found what they thought was Cooper's parachute. That's why when I heard about all this, I was sure it wasn't Cooper's."